Clifford Martin Will is Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Florida, Chercheur Associé at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, and the James S. McDonnell Professor of Space Sciences Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. Born in Hamilton, Canada in
1946, he obtained a B.Sc.
in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from McMaster University in 1968.
In 1971, he obtained a Ph.D. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena, and remained at Caltech for one year as an Instructor in Physics.
He was an Enrico Fermi Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago from
1972 to 1974, and from 1974 to 1981 was Assistant
Professor of Physics at Stanford University. In 1981 he joined Washington University in St. Louis
as Associate Professor, in 1985 became Professor of Physics, from 1991 to 1996
and 1997 to 2002 served as Chairman, and from 2005 to 2012 was McDonnell Professor.

He was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2007. He was elected a Fellow of the American
Physical Society in 1989, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in
2002, and of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation in 2016.

He has been an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow (1975 - 79), a Mellon Foundation
Junior Faculty Fellow (1978- 79), a J. William Fulbright Fellow (1996- 97) and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (1996 - 97). In 1996, he was named Distinguished
Alumnus in the Sciences by McMaster University, and in 2013 he was awarded the degree Doctor of Science honoris causa by the University of Guelph, Canada. In 2019, he was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal by the Albert Einstein Society in Bern, Switzerland.

He has published over 200 scientific
articles, including 21 major review articles, 29 popular or semi-popular articles,
and three books, Theory and Experiment in Gravitational Physics (Cambridge
University Press, 1981; 2nd Edition, 2018), Was Einstein Right? (Basic
Books, 1986), and Gravity: Newtonian, post-Newtonian, Relativistic, with Eric Poisson (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Was Einstein Right? won the 1987 American Institute
of Physics Science Writing Award, was selected one of the 200 best books for
1986 by the New York Times Book Review, and has undergone translation
into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Korean, Greek,
Persian, and Chinese.

His recent professional activities
include: Editor-in-Chief of Classical and Quantum Gravity (2009 - 18);
Chair, Division of Astrophysics, American Physical Society (2012 - 13); Member of
Space Studies Board, National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council (2011- 15); President of the International Society on General Relativity and
Gravitation (2004 - 07); Chair of the NASA Science Advisory Committee
for Gravity Probe-B (1998 - 2011); member of the National Academy of
Sciences Committees on Gravitational Physics (1997 - 99); Physics of the
Universe (2000 - 02); Beyond Einstein Program Assessment (2006 - 07); and ASTRO 2010 Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics (Cosmology
and Fundamental Physics Science Panel (2009- 10).

His research interests are theoretical, encompassing the observational and
astrophysical implications of Einstein's general theory of relativity,
including gravitational radiation, black holes, cosmology, the
physics of curved spacetime, and the theoretical interpretation of
experimental tests of general relativity.